Leon M. Lederman
1922–2018, New York City, New York, USA, Rexburg, Idaho, USA
American physicist who shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics for proving that the muon neutrino is a distinct particle, and who later co-discovered the bottom quark.
Born in New York City to Russian-Jewish immigrants, Lederman earned his PhD at Columbia University in 1951 and spent nearly three decades on its faculty. With Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger he led the 1962 'two-neutrino' experiment at Brookhaven that founded high-energy neutrino physics. As director of Fermilab (1979–1989) he oversaw construction of the Tevatron, after his group had discovered the bottom quark there in 1977. He was also a prominent advocate for science education, helping found the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy and popularizing the term 'God particle' for the Higgs boson.
Nobel-winning work
In 1962 Lederman, Schwartz and Steinberger used Brookhaven's Alternating Gradient Synchrotron to send a beam of neutrinos — produced by the decay of accelerated pions — into a 10-ton spark chamber. The neutrinos produced muons but essentially never electrons, proving that the neutrino emitted together with a muon (ν_μ) is a particle distinct from the electron neutrino (ν_e).
The result, published in Physical Review Letters in 1962, established that leptons come in separate 'generations' and created neutrino beams as an experimental tool — a cornerstone of the Standard Model.
Workplaces: Columbia University, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab)
United States